The Natural Way of Things

by Charlotte Wood Narrated by Ailsa Piper

Overview

Two women awaken from a drugged sleep to find themselves imprisoned in an abandoned property in the middle of a desert. The Natural Way of Things is a gripping, starkly imaginative exploration of contemporary misogyny and corporate control, and of what it means to hunt and be hunted. But most of all, it is the story of two friends, their sisterly love and courage.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

06/06/2016
The latest from Australian novelist Wood (Animal People) is allegory at its best, a phantasmagoric portrait of modern culture's sexual politics textured by psychological realism and sparing lyricism. The unsettling opening launches readers into a nightmare. A group of drugged women wake up in a remote, dilapidated compound whose wild grounds are surrounded by an electrified fence. They are sheared and leashed and marched and beaten. "You need to know what you are," one of the guards tells them. As glancing references to their former lives indicate, each of the "bald and frightened girls" was at the center of a public scandal involving powerful men: sports stars, politicians, television hosts, religious leaders. Their horrid, punishing captivity is also marked by an eerie normality. One of their captors checks his online dating profile; another does morning yoga. The women form tenuous bonds over their extended detention, but they have also internalized the culture's sexist attitudes—the "dull fear and hatred" of the female body—and thus their sisterhood is occasionally riven by suspicion and scorn. Distinguishing themselves from the group are two fierce, introspective protagonists, Yolanda and Verla, who scour the land for game and mushrooms and reject the path of "trailing, limping obedience." Despite its overt message, the novel seldom feels programmatic because of Wood's gorgeous, elliptical style. (June)

From the Publisher

Praise for The Natural Way of Things

“Beautiful and savage – think Atwood in the outback.”
—Paula Hawkins, author of The Girl on the Train

“[Wood’s] short, gripping book begins as an allegory of thuggish misogyny then evolves into a far stranger and more challenging feminist parable.”
—John Powers, Fresh Air

"...one of those unforgettable reading experiences.”
—Liane Moriarty, author of Truly Madly Guilty, in The New York Times 

"Like the surreal prison itself, Ms. Wood's writing is direct and spare, yet capable of bursting with unexpected beauty."
—The Economist

"It is, unfortunately, never a bad time to discuss the persistence of violence committed against women, and the perceived ownership of women’s bodies. Wood comes at the issue with a fresh, thrilling perspective: that of a dystopian novelist, one who constructs worlds in dire disrepair, but woefully similar to our own."
—Huffington Post

"The Natural Way of Things is a prescient feminist horror novel you need to read."
—Jezebel 

"While there are definite hints of Atwood there, The Natural Way of Things is definitely its own animal."
—BookRiot

"An absorbing plot, lyrical prose, and discomfiting imagery makes Wood's novel decidedly gripping.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“VERDICT: A shocking and vital work for all readers.”
—Library Journal (starred review)

“Uncomfortably bold, The Natural Way of Things is an everywoman's hero tale.”
—Shelf Awareness (starred review)

“What sets Wood’s The Natural Way of Things apart, what makes it a truly urgent read is that it is not an allegory and it is not a dystopian novel: it is a reality.”
—Full Stop

"The Natural Way of Things is an extraordinary novel: inspired, powerful, at once coherent and dreamlike."
—The Sydney Morning Herald

"It's rare to pick up a novel and from the opening pages be not only gripped by the story on the page but also by the keenness of the intelligence and audacity of the immagination at work."
—The Weekend Australian

"A modern-day fable of rural gothic dystopia. Think Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter and chuck in a dose of Mad Max's avenging angel Furiosa and you get the idea."
—Caroline Baum, Anne Summers Reports

"As allegory, as a novel, as vision and as art The Natural Way of Things is stunning."
—Christos Tsiolkas, author of The Slap

"This is a stunning exploration of ambiguities—of power, of morality, of judgment. With a fearless clarity, Wood's elegantly spare and brutal prose dissects humanity, hatreds, our ambivalent capacities for friendship and betrayal, and the powerful appearance—always—of moments of grace and great beauty...It will not leave you easily; it took my breath away."
—Ashley Hay, author of The Railwayman's Life 

"A brave, brilliant book. I would defy anyone to read it and not come out a changed person."
—Malcolm Knox, author of The Wonder Lover

Library Journal

★ 04/15/2016
In an utterly remote and barren part of Australia, ten young women are starved, sedated, dressed in outlandish Puritanical garb, and led about like dogs. Yolanda can't even remember how she got there, but it soon emerges that they are all being punished for past sexual sins. Making her U.S. debut with a novel that won the Australian Independent Booksellers Award as Best Novel and Best Book of the Year, Wood effectively renders the captors' brutality and the women's Lord-of-the-Flies struggle to survive. But it's the eventual bonding (particularly between Yolanda and the somehow familiar Verla) that is the novel's triumph. VERDICT A shocking and vital work for all readers.

Kirkus Reviews

2016-03-30
An engrossing novel set in the barren Australian Outback in which women are held captive, victims of a violently misogynist system. Wood's allegorical novel—her first to be published in the U.S.—is at once brutal and beautiful. Imprisoned in a desert holding, surrounded by electric fencing, sleeping in dank doghouses, filthy, starving, and beaten, 10 girls struggle to keep alive and keep sane. They have been drugged and abducted, accused of licentiousness. Their sexuality has been criminalized; they have slept with the wrong man or have been raped or have resisted rape, and for these incidents have been shorn, shackled, and shamed. When the power goes out everywhere but the fence and it becomes clear that no one is coming to release them—or their guards—they must live by whatever remains of their own strength, dedicated "to the one quiet, animal triumph: survival." Yolanda and Verla, leaders of this desperate and dehumanized group, become hunters—for sources of life and of death. Surreal yet intensely vivid, the novel is disturbing and enthralling. It makes its point—that "it was men who started wars, who did the world's killing and raping and maiming"—plainly, just short of perfervidly. Haunting, imaginative language brings the characters' madness and suffering to life. An absorbing plot, lyrical prose, and discomfiting imagery make Wood's novel decidedly gripping.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940177249766
Publisher:	Wavesound from W. F. Howes Ltd
Publication date:	06/02/2016
Edition description:	Unabridged

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